Scatology and Eschatology
The Recovery of the Flesh in Andrei Platonov's Happy Moscow
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8011349 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Keith Livers (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 59 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 154-182 |
| Publication date | 2000-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Slavic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2696908 |
| OpenAlex | W2334748888 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
It has been suggested that the core of Andrei Platonov's linguistic and artistic innovation as embodied in such masterpieces as Chevengur and Kotlovan (The foundation pit) lies in his masterful undermining of the Utopian project. If utopianism consists, as Gary S. Morson suggests, in an attempt to fuse the transcendent with the everyday, then Platonov's unique contribution to the genre's undoing lies in "a series of ontologically vivid parodies of the genre in which the fusion routinely fails to take place." Thus the pathos of the author's works of the late 1920s and early 1930s revolves inescapably around the failure of the ideal to materialize and become reified. This movement is reciprocal, since the material substrata of being are never infused with the animating warmth of spirit; instead matter acts as a void that condemns the spirit it would ideally preserve to entropy and finally death
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Fable · Literature · Pathos · Psychoanalysis · Reinterpretation · Undoing · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |